The
British Library is currently engaged in a program to enable digital
access to the Persian collections and has now reached the end of the
second year of a planned three-year partnership project with the Iran
Heritage Foundation and other supporters. The project involves creating
catalogue records for manuscripts which are uncatalogued, standardizing
the existing print records and creating digital files to make them
available online. At the same time we aim to digitise 50 of the most
significant manuscripts within the three year period. By the end of the
initial three-year partnership, records of nearly all acquisitions made
after 1903 will be available online. Currently, details of over 2,500
works are searchable on Fihrist, a union catalogue of some of the major
Arabic script manuscript collections in the UK, and will also be
available within the Library's own manuscripts' catalogue. - See more
at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/persian.html#sthash.seXivBPV.dpuf

The
British Library is currently engaged in a program to enable digital
access to the Persian collections and has now reached the end of the
second year of a planned three-year partnership project with the Iran
Heritage Foundation and other supporters. The project involves creating
catalogue records for manuscripts which are uncatalogued, standardizing
the existing print records and creating digital files to make them
available online. At the same time we aim to digitise 50 of the most
significant manuscripts within the three year period. By the end of the
initial three-year partnership, records of nearly all acquisitions made
after 1903 will be available online. Currently, details of over 2,500
works are searchable on Fihrist, a union catalogue of some of the major
Arabic script manuscript collections in the UK, and will also be
available within the Library's own manuscripts' catalogue - See more at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/persian.html#sthash.seXivBPV.dpuf

The
British Library is currently engaged in a program to enable digital
access to the Persian collections and has now reached the end of the
second year of a planned three-year partnership project with the Iran
Heritage Foundation and other supporters. The project involves creating
catalogue records for manuscripts which are uncatalogued, standardizing
the existing print records and creating digital files to make them
available online. At the same time we aim to digitise 50 of the most
significant manuscripts within the three year period. By the end of the
initial three-year partnership, records of nearly all acquisitions made
after 1903 will be available online. Currently, details of over 2,500
works are searchable on Fihrist, a union catalogue of some of the major
Arabic script manuscript collections in the UK, and will also be
available within the Library's own manuscripts' catalogue. - See more
at:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/asian-and-african/persian.html#sthash.seXivBPV.dpuf

Thanks to the sponsorship of the Jamsetji Tata Trust, the World Collections Programme, and the Friends of the British Library, you can now read an eighteenth-century version of the Ramayana online. The so-called Mewar Ramayana was commissioned by Maharana Jagat Singh II (r. 1734 - 1754) of Udaipur. Pieces of the manuscript arrived in Europe via James Tod, while other pieces remained in India and circulated through private collections.The manuscript has now been reunified through a massive digitization project.The file is quite large and takes some time to load (it took more than twenty minutes to load and process it on my office computer). But it is so awesome. The British Library's "Turning the Pages" feature lets you flip the pages upward (rather than left-to-right, right-to-left), so you can experience it as it was meant to be read.

The digital manuscript is accompanied by with a pop-up box of English-language guidance. Click on the image below to see the manuscript.

About This Blog

A compilation of research notes made while conducting research in London, France, and India for a Ph.D. dissertation in architectural history. Occasional updates and notes added as I come across interesting things while working on my book manuscript (working title: Astronomy in Motion).